You may hear people talking about playing styles. For example, “Gus Hanson is a very aggressive player”, or “Dan Harrington tends to be very conservative”. Clearly, since a player can reach this level of fame and ability at either end of the spectrum, no playing style is inherently good or bad. What matters is that you play your style well, and that you don’t become predictable.
An ‘aggressive’ player is somebody who plays a lot of pots, with a wide variety of starting hands. In order to play this way successfully, you will need to make a lot of raises and reraises, even when you don’t have the best of things. You need to show as few cards as possible, and accept that fact that you’ll frequently get your fingers burned. You’ll see big increases and decreases in your chip stack, and may end up on occasion, looking a little foolish. Most of your best moves will pass unnoticed by your opponents, as the majority of the hands you win will be due to the opponent folding.
A ‘conservative’ player is somebody who plays very few pots, though when he does, he still plays them very positively. If this is the path you choose, expect to play few pots (remember that at a full table, you’ll only have the best hand on average one time in nine or ten), but you’ll lose even fewer hands.
There are advantages and disadvantages to playing aggressively.
For one thing, you won’t need to worry about a bad run of cards – because you are able to play a much wider variety of starting hands, you’ll always be very heavily involved in the game, where a conservative player may lose a lot of chips to the blinds waiting for a playable hand.
Also, you’ll be much harder to read. Did you just raise because you had a big hand, or because you’re playing aggressively. If you are conservative in your play, people will respect your bets a lot more – this makes it more likely that bluffs will work, but it also makes it hard to get paid when you pick up a big hand.
On the other hand, if you’re playing weaker hands, you’ll face much more difficult decisions on the Flop. If you’ve got Ace-Seven, and the Flop Turns up Jack-Seven-Three, you have no idea if you’re ahead or not. If you only play strong hands, this is a problem far less often (you’re far less likely to be playing with a Seven, for example).
Also, you can really get hurt if you run into a monster hand. If you keep betting, it’s very easy for a player to keep calling you if they’ve got a big hand – they aren’t giving anything away, but if they had to be the one raising, you would have a much better idea of the strength of their hand.
Note that when we are talking about an aggressive or conservative player here, we assume in either case that when they do play a hand, they play it positively. A lot of weaker players tend to play very passively, limping into pots hoping that they will hit a big Flop to justify all the blinds they pay out when they miss You can combine how aggressive somebody is with how active they are to build a simple profile of them.
An active, conservative player plays few pots, but attacks when he has the best of it. It’s very difficult to get chips off this type of player, but if you’re careful, you shouldn’t lose too many to them either.
An active, aggressive player plays a lot of pots, attacking all the time. They are very dangerous (even if they don’t know what they are doing!) as you will almost inevitably end up playing a lot of pots against them, for large stakes. If you try to avoid them, they can end up dominating the table, stealing pots all over the place.
A passive, conservative player plays very few pots, and doesn’t commit very many chips when they do. This type of player will rarely be involved in big pots, and will rarely win many chips. You may have a lot of success attacking them with raises and bluffs, as they will tend to avoid large pots, but in general, they will tend to get ground down by the blinds, distributing their chips to whoever wins the most pots.
A passive, aggressive player – often referred to as a fish – plays a lot of pots very passively. They will limp into a lot of hands hoping to pick up a great hand on the Flop, but as we’ve just seen, this can leave them with a lot of mediocre hands. If you play the percentages against players like this, you should relieve them of their chips very easily.
Whether you play a lot of hands or only a few, it’s important to maximise the chips that you pick up when you do hit, and to do that, you need to be positive. Whether you disguise your good hands by playing a lot of weaker ones the same way, or conserve your stack of chips by playing only premium hands, when the cards do come your way, you need to cash in.
From here on in, when I’m discussing playing styles, I’ll assume that the player plays positively when they do play a hand. If they don’t, they aren’t worthy of discussion, as they can’t hurt you.
Whilst it’s possible to play very successfully either very aggressively or very conservatively, or anywhere in between, it’s far easier for somebody relatively new to the game to play tightly. In addition, it’s a much more reliable way to play, as it doesn’t presuppose that other players will react in certain ways to your actions. For example, if you are playing low-stakes poker, people are far more likely to call your raises (they have less to lose, and less idea of what they are doing). Adjusting your strategy to fit with the other players’ strategies is essential to maximise your profits. So, if you are playing conservatively, you may want to make more moves if everyone else is playing very cautiously – we’ll see an example of this later when we look at ‘The Bubble’ – the point in a tournament where there are a few more players than there are prizes, and people become far more concerned about surviving until they are guaranteed to win some money.
So how do you play against other styles?
Combating Other People’s Playing Styles
If somebody is playing conservatively, there is very little you can do. When they push their chips in, they generally have a better hand than you. If you try to be aggressive, they will just keep folding until they hit a good hand, then take a lot of your chips. This really shows how strong conservative play is when the blinds are small compared to the size of the stacks, and even aggressive players tend to play conservatively in the early stages of a tournament. Remember that no player leading after the first day of the World Series of Poker has ever gone on to win the tournament. In the early stages, a steady accumulation of chips with a largely conservative strategy is the best way to ensure your active participation in the later stages.
There are a few things that you can do against an aggressive player. Firstly, you can play a much wider range of hands against him – give less credence to his bets than you would otherwise. Be careful – an aggressive player will get just as many good cards as you will, and they may hit big Flops that aren’t obvious. For example, if you opponent is playing aggressively, and picks up:
They may raise you with this hand. If you’re holding something like:
You call their raise. The Flop Turns up:
You’ve hit top pair, with top kicker, so you’ve every right to feel ahead. The only hands that a conservative player would have raised with, that have you beaten are Jacks, Queens, Kings or Aces. In fact, unless they are playing a very similar hand to yours, they are unlikely to have hit the Flop at all. So at this point, you’ve probably got a conservative player beaten, and you both know it. Since you don’t want to give them a free card, you’d bet aggressively at this pot most of the time, and take it down (unless you feel the Implied Pot Odds are better than the risks of losing given another card, in which case you’d try to induce a bluff).
But against an aggressive player like this one, he could have almost any two cards – your tens are still quite strong, but he could have Eight-Nine for an open-ended straight draw, Ten-Seven, Ten-Two, Seven-Two, or a pocket pair of Twos, Sevens or Tens. Okay, there are a few hands there that most players wouldn’t play even aggressively, but it’s much harder to be confident. Factor this into your decision-making. If your opponent bets, you may have to consider laying this down, though if you act first, and bet strongly, you should take the pot from them. Clearly, position is more important against more aggressive players, and successful aggressive players will take position into account.
We’ll look later at the use of bets on the Flop to determine whether you are ahead or behind your opponent, but for now, here is one tactic that can work well against aggressive players.
Flat-Calling. If you hit a big hand, and you raise with it then (certainly if you’re playing conservatively) your opponent will probably get out of your way. But if you can rely on them to play aggressively, then showing weakness by flat-calling their bets will encourage them to put more chips into the pot.
If you choose to call their bet, you may encourage another bet or two later on (this is called the Rope-A-Dope). Whilst this does open up the possibility of their hand overtaking yours, the additional bets that you’ll pick up when they miss will make this a very profitable play a lot of the time.
Alternatively, when they raise, you can reraise them (this is called a check-raise). They’ll almost certainly fold, and you will take the pot. This will win you fewer chips than the Rope-A-Dope, but without the risks of giving away an extra card.
I use both of them, check-raising when my hand is only marginally strong (and hence likely to be overtaken) and flat-calling if I have a very strong hand.
Varying Your Style
According to the Fundamental Theory Of Poker, you can make a lot of money from misleading your opponents into making the wrong decisions. Indeed, if everyone is playing conservatively, it can be the only way to Turn a profit). But what’s fairly clear is that if you play one way for the entire game, you’ll become predictable – at which point, you may as well just Turn your cards over at the start of the hand. For example, if you raise with big hands, call with reasonable hands, and fold the rest, what does your opponent do with a big hand? If you call, they know they have the best of it, and can raise you. If they have an average hand and you raise, they know they should fold. If they know what cards you have, you can’t induce a mistake.
Instead, you need to vary your play. Suppose you raise with a big hand 80% of the time, and call 20% of the time. With an average hand, you raise 20% of the time, and call 80% of the time. If you are four times as likely to get an average hand as a big hand, what do your bets say about you?
If in 100 hands, you get 5 big hands, and 20 average hands. You’ll raise four times with a big hand, and call once with a big hand. You’ll raise four times with an average hand, and call sixteen times. In this case, your opponent knows that a call almost always equates to an average hand. But a raise could indicate a big or an average hand. If you also raise occasionally with nothing, and call quite often with nothing, you could potentially be raising or calling with anything. It’s very difficult to read a player that does this, but you can still get a feeling about their style of play.
Another way to mix things up is to vary your style. If people think you are playing conservatively, you can get a lot of chips by being aggressive, as your hands have a lot of credibility. On the other hand, if people think you are playing aggressively, you can win a lot of chips by playing conservatively, as they are more likely to call your bets.
Vary your play either so that you change whenever you think your opponents have pinned you to a style – or randomly. Be aggressive in the first half of each hour, and conservative in the second half. Or split your play based on the location of the second hand on your watch. Vary the amount of your bets similarly sometimes putting in a large raise, sometimes a smaller one.
Bluffing
If you’ve watched a lot of televised poker, you may think that players are bluffing constantly through a game, but in reality, it’s only one small part of the game, however aggressive you are. You only see the highlights on television, and wild bluffs make for a good show.
But no matter how conservatively you play, you need to bluff if you want to beat good players – it’s the best way to encourage people to call your bets when you do have a hand. If you only bet with a premium hand, there’s really no good reason for somebody to call you unless they have a monster – it’s just not worthwhile.
Where possible, you should take into account the possibility of a bluff when working out the expected value of a bet.
Here’s an example. There are two of you left on the River, and your cards are:
The table is showing the following cards:
The pot has built to £75, and your opponent has been calling your bets to this point. But here, you decide to check, and he bets £75. What do you do?
The obvious answer is that he’s hit the King, and you should fold. But what hands would your opponent have that would fit his style of play? He called pre-Flop, and again on the Flop. What cards would he do this with? Suited Connectors, a Pocket Pair (up to about Eights or Nines) or Ace – X (up to about Ace – Nine), maybe a few King – X hands would all justify a flat-call pre-Flop. But only a few of these would give him anything after the Flop – Pocket Fives, Pocket Eights, maybe a King-Jack or Queen-Jack? The Pocket Pairs would have given him ‘Trips’ (3 of a kind) and his call after the Flop would be very cautious, or a trap. You’re almost certainly ahead pre-Flop, and you bet on the Flop, hoping to chase him off. But he calls, surprisingly, and he calls another bet on the Turn.
So you feel that you should be ahead, but your opponent is still in the hand, and now there’s a King on the board. Was he slow-playing three-of-a-kind, did he hit a pair of jacks (you’ll have him out-kicked if he does), or has he hit the King? King-Jack would be a plausible hand that’s got you beaten, but there’s a number of hands that fit his play – including a bluff.
So what are the odds? Based on your assessment of his play so far, you decide there’s a 50% chance that it’s a bluff, and a 50% chance that he’s got a legitimate hand. Of the good hands that he plays, you estimate that 50% of the time, you’ve got him beaten.
So, do you call? 50% of the time you’ll beat his bluff, and 25% of the time you’ll beat his legitimate hand (50% of 50%). 25% of the time you’ll lose.
So, you’ll win £150 75% of the time, and lose £75 25% of the time. A quick calculation shows that this is a clear call.
You call, he Turns over
And you win the hand.
His call pre-Flop makes some sense (this is a playable hand) and after the Flop he had an open-ended straight draw and a flush draw – 15 outs. Can’t blame him for calling again. The call on the Turn was a little more shaky, but when he missed the River, he was left with no hand.
So, he pretended to have hit the King, realising that that would beat whatever you had. It didn’t work, as it didn’t really fit what had happened to that point.
One further point here – you might have thought that a reraise on the River would make sense, but this would be a mistake. You would win no more chips if he was behind (since he’d fold), but if he was ahead, he’d win more chips from you. There’s no way that this would have made you any money. Betting the River often throws up situations – when your opponent will only call if he’s ahead, so be very careful.
Clearly, you need to bear in mind what you’ve told your opponents about your cards to that point, if you decide to bluff. If your bluff contradicts this, they’ll know you’ve either been bluffing before and hit your hand, or you’ve been honest before, and now you’re bluffing.
Also, be careful if you bluff with cards still to be dealt. You are far more likely to be called, as your opponent knows they may still hit their hand, even if you are being honest. In general, you should stick to a semi-bluff if there are cards still to appear – that is to say, a bluff where you still have a chance of getting the best hand further down the line.
Whether or not you should bluff is strongly influenced by how likely you are to be called. As a result, bluffing will work far more effectively against a conservative player than it will against an aggressive player – a more conservative player will fold unless they have a good hand, where a more aggressive player will be far more inclined to call you (or even reraise you).
Semi-Bluffs
One very powerful type of bluff is the semi-bluff. This is a special type of bluff, when there are cards still to be dealt, and you still have a reasonable chance of making your hand.
Consider the hand from the last chapter, but now view it from your opponent’s perspective.
You are holding:
And the Flop comes down:
In this case, had the other person not bet, you may have been able to win the hand with a semi-bluff. You have no hand at the moment, but with so many cards to draw to, you still have a decent chance of making the best hand – in this case, you have two cards to see, and any Spade, Four or Nine will give you the hand. Running Sixes or Sevens may also win you the hand, but that’s unlikely.
So, you have four Fours, four Nines, and seven other Spades (remember that one of the Fours and one of the Nines are Spades, so don’t double-count them! That’s 15 cards out of 47. A quick calculation tells you that you have a 32% chance of hitting with either card remaining, or a 54% chance of winning the hand (it’s unlikely that a Straight or a Flush will be beaten).
We know that the other player has hit a pair of Jacks, and bet. But what if they hadn’t, or it was your Turn to act first. Given the opportunity to bet or not here, the mathematically sound move would be to check, and try to get a free card. Calling a bet (as you did) should only be done if the pot-odds justify it (unless you think they are bluffing).
But there is a good opportunity to steal the pot here. If you bet, and your opponent hasn’t hit their hand, there’s a good chance that they’ll fold (particularly if they are playing conservatively). If they fold, you win (and feel happy, because you’ve made them make the wrong decision according to the Fundamental Theorem Of Poker. If they call, it’s still not a big problem – you’re slightly better than 50/50 to win the hand anyway.
Of course, there are other positives here as well. If your opponent missed the Flop, then by betting, you are giving them a free card (which could work for them just as easily as for you).
Also, it can disguise your true hand. If the Turn came up as the Four of Clubs, your opponent will think it hasn’t helped you (unless they’ve recognised your move as a bluff). Let’s look at that in more detail.
Imagine now the board looks like this:
You bet, and your opponent (with the Jacks) calls. They figure that you’ve probably hit the Jack (and are losing), or you’re bluffing.
Then the Turn card comes up:
From your opponent’s perspective, this hasn’t changed your hand. If you had the Jacks before, you’d still have just a pair of Jacks (not many people would play Jack-Two). If you were bluffing, the Four of Clubs probably hasn’t given you a great hand. There is a possibility that you were playing Six-Seven, but that’s just one possibility out of many potential hands.
Playing this hand more traditionally, you’d check on the Flop, and when faced with a bet, you’d probably fold (since you’d have to pay again to see the River), and a good sized bet would force you off the hand.
If you’re willing to semi-bluff from time to time, you’ll be able to get involved in a lot more pots. Just be aware that you have to have a decent chance of making the best hand. Drawing to three Aces isn’t really enough – that’d just be a regular bluff.
The semi-bluff is an essential bet to make from time to time. If you only bet when you hit the Flop (which will be the minority of times) your opponents will just bet at you whether they have hit it or not, forcing you off a lot of hands.
The only thing that you must keep in mind is your image at the table. If you bluff and semi-bluff all the time, or even if you only do it occasionally, but have been caught at it a few times, then your bets will get you less respect, and your bluffs won’t work as well.
Be aware of one more thing. In general, you’d like to be playing for big pots when you have a good hand, and small pots when you don’t. The bluff and semi-bluff are great for taking down small pots, but very dangerous when the pot size is already large. This is particularly true when playing against weaker players, as they feel that they have to play, having committed a lot of chips into the pot. This is crazy thinking, as those chips don’t belong to that player, who should judge each move on its merits, not just on how good their cards used to be. Refusing to fold a pair of Kings when an Ace appears on the Flop is one of the most common (and expensive) mistakes a player can make.
Attacking The Blinds
Attacking the Blinds is the most common, and well-known, bluff in poker. You’re on the button, everyone else has folded (or maybe there’s a fish who called, but tends to fold to any strength). You put in a strong bet, and there are only two people left to act. The odds are that most of the time, neither will have a strong hand, and they’ll have to fold.
The danger here is that you will need to put in a strong bet to ensure that they don’t call – even if they don’t think you’re bluffing, Two-Seven off-suit will beat Ace-King off-suit 33% of the time, and they’ve already paid the Big Blind.
Here’s an example.
The Blinds are £10 and £20. It folds around to you, and you raise to £40. The Small Blind folds.
So, the pot’s got £70 in it, and it’ll cost the Big Blind £40 to see the Flop. Those are pretty good pot odds, and after the Flop, they’ll have the opportunity to bluff first, so there’s a very good reason for them to play a wide variety of hands (unless they think you’ve got a better hand already than they are likely to make (e.g. Aces against their King-Queen). The small amount that it costs the Big Blind to call make it a much more enticing option, making your bluff less effective.
You need to bet a big amount to steal the blinds, as the reduced cost of playing a hand from the Big Blind can make them more inclined to call.
Consider this. If you can steal the blinds once per round, you’ll break even, even if you don’t play any other hands. So if you find that you can steal the blinds quite easily, do so, and you’ll be able to play only premium hands the rest of the time. The best part is that most of your opponents (those to your right) will be able to do absolutely nothing about it, other than trying to push their chips in before you do (i.e. being forced to bluff). This will cost most players in the long run, so they probably won’t bother.
Tilt
If a player is on Tilt, it means that for some reason, something has happened to make them start playing erratically, usually a bad beat or a badly misplayed hand.
This can result in a player making very aggressive bets at inappropriate times, or limping into every pot hoping to hit a big Flop (or miss it completely, giving them another chance to curse their bad luck).
I can only offer two pieces of advice to somebody who believes that they might fall apart like this. The first is this – the better you play, the more likely you are to have the best hand, and so, the more likely your opponent is to get a lucky card. You can’t suffer a bad beat if you’ve got the worst hand – so if you get more bad beats than your opposition, then it may be a sign that you’re playing well.
Alternatively, it can be a sign that you aren’t betting large enough amounts, so your opponents are getting pot-odds to call, even if they have the worst of it. If somebody has a 33% chance of beating you after the Turn, then one time in three, they will – if you let them. If you bet a large amount, they won’t get the 2:1 Pot Odds that they need, and will have to fold (if they are playing by the numbers). If you bet less than the size of the pot, then they will have a positive EV to call. Here’s an example:
You have:
Your opponent has:
And the table looks like this:
The pot has £100 in it. What do you bet?
Unless they’ve hit Trips (in which case, you’ve still got four outs), you’re ahead here. If you bet £25, what should they do?
Your opponent will win with one of the remaining Clubs – that’s 9/46 cards (they can’t see yours). It’ll cost them £25 to bet if they miss, and they will win £100 the rest of the time. A quick calculation, and the EV is (9/46 * £120) – (37/46 * £25) = £23.48 - £20.11 = £3.37. So they should call. Since you are ahead, if they hit, you can feel you’ve got a bad beat. But it’s your own fault for under-betting. If you’d thrown in £50, they would have folded, as their EV was (9/46 * £150) – (37/46 * £50) = £29.35 - £40.22 = -£10.87. So they would fold.
Bigger bets = Fewer Bad Beats. Of course, if they were holding the other two Aces, you’d have lost more money…
Playing With Fish
I read an interesting anecdote by Phil Gordon once, about a fish. His friend was seeing just about every Flop, missing most of them, and losing chips quickly every time he played. He expressed his displeasure at the way that things were going, and another of Phil’s friends pointed out to him that if he didn’t see every Flop, he wouldn’t lose as much. A third friend asked him to “stop tapping on the aquarium”.
If somebody is a fish, you should be able to take their money off them very easily. Why would you want to scare them away, or tell them to play more tightly? Tapping on the aquarium scares the fish away. Since you want them to stay, don’t point out their mistakes to them. You want them to play against you!
